Pictured are Ricardo Jota (left) and Daniel Wigdor (right); photography by Jenna Muirhead.

This year’s group of 10 honoured projects included Human-Computer Interaction work by DCS faculty member Daniel Wigdor and Postdoctoral Fellow Ricardo Jota. Their citation reads:

“[Wigdor and Jota’s] invention, created in collaboration with co-inventors Dr. Clifton Forlines (VP of Software, Tactual Labs) and Mr. Steven Sanders (Co-President, Tactual Labs), is the Input Processing Unit (IPU), which reduces end-to-end latency to less than 10ms. They can achieve this by generating the response to user input in computer hardware, rather than relying on application software to provide this response, as in traditional systems. This is accomplished while also achieving two critical goals. First, the responses are in context, so that the user believes it is the application itself that provides them. Second, there is no appreciable difference in writing applications for our system than writing for traditional tools. The invention has been spun out as Tactual Labs, which, in partnership with U of T, is continuing to develop the technology.”

DCS has been recognized by the Inventor of the Year award since its inception: past winners include Nick Koudas (2011) – with Nilesh Bansal, Ron Baecker (2011) – with Alex Levy, Aakash Sahney, and Kevin Tonon; and Eyal de Lara and Mike Brudno (2012) – with Andres Lagar-Cavilla, Adin Scannell, Joseph Whitney.

More information about the 2013 awards can be found here. The U of T Research and Innovation Office announcement can be found here.

Congratulations, Daniel and Ricardo!